Singing is good for your health, it’s a great way to unleash your creativity, socialize with other musicians and it’s a whole lot of fun.
I’ve listed below the essentials every singer needs to know when it comes to learning how to sing. I’ve tried to keep it simple so you can stay focused on just the things you need to know and overlook all the things you don’t.
1. Breathing:
Breathing is the most vital feature of learning how to sing because your breath is the mystic key to making your instrument (i.e. your body) function. As you breathe out, your air rushes past your vocal folds (also called vocal cords) making them quiver. This movement is what permits you to produce sound. Breathing for singing all starts with your diaphragm which is a thin muscular dome that is sited below your ribcage. There are exercises you can do to get your diaphragm to work. Learning how to tap into your diaphragm and breathe appropriately for singing is the very principal thing any singer should learn to do. Take some time really getting this step right because if you don’t it will come back to sting you later. Everything comes back to your breathing; your phrasing, your pitch, how long you can sing a note or notes for, even whether or not you will be able to do certain vocal techniques like vibrato, usage of head-voice, etc . It all still comes back to your breathing, so get this step right first.
2. Relax
Your entire body is your instrument and just like a sports expert, you need to build up certain muscles and don’t too relax when you sing. You will need to build up the muscles surrounding your vocal folds and also your primary strength, but then you need to relax each time you sing. This means relaxing your stomach muscles when you go to inhale and relaxing the muscles around your throat while you sing. It seems like a certainly easy thing to do and it is…eventually. But first you need to get into the tradition of relaxing, make it a routine because we obviously tend to hold a lot of stress and tension in our neck and shoulder area which can affect your breathing and therefore your ability to sing well.
3. Develop your hearing
Singing is a hearing art form. That means, you need to develop those ears! Your job as a singer is to sing notes that are in tune and which sound good with the rest of the music and this is called PITCH. Having good pitch is a total rudimentary for singers because it doesn’t matter how good your voice is, if you don’t sing in tune you won’t sound good at all in anyway. So how do you develop your hearing? You undergo Ear Training. There are gears you can use to start hearing whether you are singing the right notes or not. These gears will help you to identify essentials in music such as intervals, scales and even chords. The logic is to start with the simple paraphernalia and get it right before moving on.
4. Substitute bad singing habits with good ones
At the start, singing is all about breaking bad habits like mumbling and substituting or swapping them with good habits. In the instance of mumbling for illustration, you would need to start moving your mouth more and making sure you can hear all of the words you are singing. I advise taping yourself when you sing and listen back to hear whether you can make out all of the lyrics or not. If you can’t well, then you need to keep exercise on breaking that mumbling habit. As a learner singer, you won’t know which habits you need to work on. That’s where a decent singing educator can come in handy. They should be able to figure out if you are mumbling or slurring.
5. Sing a lot
Singers sing. Runners run. Painters paint. If you’re serious about becoming a singer or even if you just want to improve your singing voice, the best thing you can do is to spend more time singing. Just singing around the house or in the car or in the toilet or even at work will help you to:
i. Build up the muscles around your vocal folds/cords.
ii. Help you learn repertoire: if you’re singing a mound of new songs from the radio then you are actually building up your repertoire list
iii. Help you decide what type of music you like and what type of singer you want to become; there are so many different pathways you can take when you learn how to sing. Spending time just listening to music and singing along will help you to work out the type of songs you enjoy singing and what your musical encouragements and motivations are.
